The ability to print food with additive manufacturing is believed to potentially have a tremendous impact as it would provide complete food design freedom and thus rapid product innovation; would allow a highly efficient use of materials; and can eventually contribute to an increased consumer acceptance of alternative food materials (e.g. proteins from algae, among others) by turning them into well-structured and tasty food products.
The state-of-the-art for AM of food is very limited and has been mainly focused on Fused Deposition Modeling, which is based on extrusion techniques. However, this technique requires the material to be extrudate-able, which restricts the choice of materials that can be used.
Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) is a promising AM technique. SLS uses a high power laser to fuse small particles into a mass that has a 3-dimensional shape. The laser selectivity fuses powdered material by scanning cross-sections on the surface of a powder bed. After each cross-section is scanned, the powder bed is lowered by one layer thickness, a new layer of material is applied on top, and the process is repeated until the shape is completed.
SLS has widely been used for the manufacture of 3D shapes for industrial manufacturing such as metal or ceramic based 3D shapes that will otherwise not be possible to produce via traditional molding processes. For example, SLS has been used for the fabrication of porous medical devices, ceramic spare parts for high-tech industries, etc. However, SLS is practically unknown in food manufacturing.
The main hurdle in SLS technology applied to edible compositions is to find suitable powders, wherein individual powder particles can sinter together under the application of a laser without resulting in the decomposition of the material itself. Furthermore, it is desired that the sintering should lead to the formation of a consolidated, free standing 3D object with a high degree of design resolution. In addition, it is desirable to be able to construct diverse edible objects combining different materials.